Motherboard Highlights

The bottom right
hand corner of the MSI 975X Platinum motherboard is very busy. Here you'll
find five Serial
ATA II ports along with the USB headers and front panel
I/O connectors. The big red button is for clearing the CMOS, much easier
to use than a jumper. The light blue SATA header is
provided by the JMicron JMB361 chipset. RAID comes care of the Intel ICH7DH southbridge
chipset

MSI
places the two PCI Express x16 slots far apart from each other which is
good. If you are to run two videocards, the MSI 975X Platinum
motherboard automatically splits the PCI Express x16 bus equally between the
two slots. PCI bus mastering devices go in the orange slot
first.

MSI does an
excellent job at keeping all the large and bulky cables together in one
area. When installing the DDR2 memory please remember that the colours
represent one memory channel, not
which slots to occupy with one pair of memory. To enable dual channel memory support,
you'll need identical pairs, one in green and one in orange. The
975X Platinum motherboard is compatible with legacy 20 pin ATX power supplies, but it's
recommended to use a 400W PSU which as a 24-pin power
connector.

There is plenty of
space around the Socket 775
so you can
install larger after market heatsinks if you choose to. That's good
news for overclockers who like to use water or phase change cooling rigs,
and for low noise enthusiasts too. The passively cooled Intel 975X Express Northbridge
generates a fair amount of heat, so maintain good airflow in the chassis.

If you plan on
running two high powered PCI Express x16 videocards (like ATI
CrossFire), you will need to attach a molex
power connector to the auxiliary power connector just above the primary
PCI Express x16 slot. The board mounted components here are all well
below the bottom edge of videocards for good
clearance.

Two PCI Express x1 slots are placed in between
the two PCI Express x16 slots, even with dual slot videocard
at least one of the PCI-e x1 slots
will still be useable. The retention locks on the PCI Express x16 videocard slots
are weak, if even non-existant. If you're going to a LAN party, make
sure your videocards are properly seated in these slots before booting up your PC
for the first.